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Category Archives: Concert Poster

Dancing Ferret is having a big 20th Anniversary show at The Trocadero, and I was tapped to do the artwork for the event. It was flattering to get to do the piece, and I had a good time doing it. It was a pretty interesting request: Draw a ferret looking rather dapper with two hot goth girls with him. Sounds good to me!

The piece you see is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever created. In 2012, I heard Lamb of God, easily one of my favorite bands of all time, was coming to Philadelphia and were going to have a Meet-and-Greet before the show. I decided that since I couldn’t make it to the show I would at least get Lamb of God to sign something for me, so after some thought, I decided to just go ahead and do a gig poster JUST for them. Literally! I only made 3 copies: Two for me and one for them. The plan was to get two small ones, give them one, and one large version to get signed that I could put up on my wall.

When I arrived at the FYE at Broad and Chestnut, I had run over from work which was just down the street, just 7 blocks away, and I was near the end of the line. I spoke to other awesome fans, met an awesome rep from Sony who took my photo with the poster, and I was getting really excited! Finally, the moment arrived and I got to meet the band, and, despite how many times I’ve met or worked with famous people or someone I admire, I still was starstruck! I wound up barely talking and just having a giant grin on my face! The band was incredibly nice, and they signed the new album, “Resolution”, for me along with the posters. They were all really thrilled with it and like it!

That’s when I got to Randy Blythe, the front man for Lamb of God. He always stood tall to me… partly because he’s a good foot taller than me, but also because he has one hell of a voice! His personality shone through, and he loved the poster! He wound up taking a photo of it and putting it on his Twitter feed! Randy then turned to me and asked, “Hey, are you going to the show tonight?” “No, I can’t, I don’t have a ticket, but I really hope you have a great show tonight!” That’s when he turned to someone and handed me a piece of cloth. “Enjoy the show tonight, man, you earned it!” It was a pass to the show! I could hardly believe it!

I wound up walking down the stairs from the meet-and-greet and out the door with a giant grin on my face! I couldn’t believe it! Not only did I get to meet one of my favorite bands, not only did they like my work, but I just got a free ticket to the show right from them! It was surreal, and like I could hear people calling my name. And they were. “LARRY!” I turned around, all the guys in Lamb of God were yelling my name… because I left my CD up there.

I mentioned at least once how awesome it would be to actually get to do some design work for them, and who knows, maybe it’ll come true soon.

I wanted to do something COMPLETELY different as a gig poster than I had ever done before, and since Mayhem has always had an aura of terror and mysticism about them (anyone who knows Norwegian black metal will tell you that!), and I wanted to capture the feeling I got from them when I listen to “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas”, specifically the title track.

The idea of the monster was that it was this… thing. I didn’t want it to be anything, actually, just this weird otherworldly creature. Its a mix of Chtulu and the monster from Watchmen, with a bit of my own weirdness mixed in.

One thing I loved about doing this piece was the fact that it reminded me of how I worked back in High School; sitting at my desk at night drawing the most Satanic and terrifying things I could imagine!

I did do the type separately in this case, and I drew it by hand and scanned it back in. Getting the tentacles to wrap was something I wanted, but I also wanted everything behind it, too.

Other than the way the entire typography was handled on this poster, the other big change is the way I showed the main band name; I decided to let it bleed off the page. I knew it was easy enough to read that passing by you would go, “Oh fuck, MAYHEM is in town? I need to go! NOW!”

When I heard Wednesday 13 was coming to town, I knew I HAD to do a gig poster for it! He’s one of my favorite musicians, and his mix of horror, punk, and metal is just awesome! He has a sense of humor to his music that gives it a large amount of appeal, and his later work has taken on a more sinister tone that has given it a different life!

I wanted to do something that was a mix of classic horror fun and great illustration. I knew I wanted to do one of the “classic” horror movie monsters, you know, the Universal Studios monsters, and I knew I wanted to do them as women. I wound up going with The Bride of Frankenstein, which also happens to be one of my favorite songs written by Wednesday 13!

I decided to do this as fast as possible because I wanted to capture a mix of the old-style movie posters and the grindhouse ideal as well which were both heavily present in his music. I’m pretty happy with the end result!

Art-wise, this thing was insane! I had wanted to do it since August, but I never had a solid idea. With less than a week before the show, I knew I wanted to do something, so I came up with an idea Monday and Tuesday after I got home from work I went ahead and tried to do it full-tilt!

I wound up laying out everything twice, the second time just ignoring any of the rules I knew and having fun with it! That wound up being exactly what I needed, and I think there’s a good feel to the illustration that makes it come alive! I also did a live-blogging of it while working on it.

The hardest part, just like all of my posters, isn’t the illustration itself, it’s designing the actual poster. I got to it around 11:30AM and thought it would only be 30 minutes. How wrong I was! The design was the single hardest part of this piece!

I wound up using a bunch of grunge textures on it because I definitely wanted the piece to look a little old, but at the same time I wanted to make sure the colors still popped.

More than anything, though, I’ve wanted to do a great Bride of Frankenstein drawing for about 3 years now. I never really tried until I had an idea I loved, and I hope you enjoy it! She’ll be used in another piece soon!

NOFX and Anti-Flag. Easily two of my favorite punk bands! Every time NOFX comes to Philly it sells out immediately, and this time around they’re not selling tickets until the day of the show! I love doing posters for bands coming to Philly that I enjoy, especially if there isn’t any other promotion for them, so this time around I jumped on the NOFX poster.

I loved “The War on Errorism” and “Cokie the Clown”, and considering both the political nature of NOFX as of late as well as Anti-Flag, I figured skewing the current President would be appropriate.

I’m not anti-Obama, or even pro-Obama. I think the guy has done some great things and some incredibly bone-headed things as well. Caving into Republicans all the time? Really? Obama has put on the clown makeup for getting the U.S. into another pointless war or not closing Gitmo like he promised, and the Republicans threw the pie since they got him to cave in and change the date of a speech, among other things.

In other words; Obama is making himself look bad and into a joke, not me. 😉

That said, I sincerely hope everyone enjoys it! To all my liberal friends, know it was done tongue-in-cheek, and to all my conservative friends, know it was done tongue-in-cheek.

NOFX KICK ASS!!!!

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Just like most of my posters, drawing it was a lot easier than designing it! I sketched a layout I liked, and drew Obama in almost near-final detail on the street (true story!). I got home, finished the details, and inked it in almost the same time it took for me to draw it.

The hardest part in the design was nailing the carnival look. The NOFX headline was done using a tutorial I found at letterheadfonts.com. After that was everything else. I wound up using a bunch of different fonts and styles until I got something I was happy with.

It’s anger, fury, and the refusal to surrender and die in the face of evil! Its the anger and fury that comes from the oppression of those who are not represented. It’s the sound of someone furious at their government for not doing what they should, and the even greater fury that those entrusted to keep liberty in check either fail or ignore their duty to either govern or even vote for the proper caretakers.

Its the sound of someone crying out in hunger as they die from starvation while the world around them is fat and over-fed!

Its the sound of joy when victory is had, when evil fails and the freedom of the millions wins. It’s the sound or rockets blasting in the night air, of a happy family, of someone achieving their potential.

This piece is struggling to do all of that at once, and the face alone reminds you that liberty comes at a price, and sometimes its painful as all hell!

This should be one hell of a show! Holy Grail will be playing the balcony at The Troc, and admission is only $10! So unless you’re a starving artist, I think you should be able to make it, have a damn good time, and enjoy some awesome power/thrash metal!

I sketched out the poster idea about a week before I decided to work on a finish. It wasn’t a very developed concept; a woman with snakes. I always like trying to add more and more to a piece like that, and I decided to do an ode to Leviathan.

At the same time, I was looking more and more at the work of my contemporaries, especially Godmachine. His work is consistently amazing, and I wanted to try something in the style he did that seems to be, in fact, the modern illustration style (my opinion, and nothing more). That said, my apologies if its too close!

I’m pretty happy with the result. I worked on it originally as a t-shirt design that I was going to turn into a poster, but I kept running into the same problem; I didn’t like how colorful it was, especially on the poster. The original has a LOT of green, and on a whim I decided to make everything red. It worked great for the poster, and so you have this.

A lot of blood, sweat, and annoyance went into this piece. The woman’s head was a nightmare to draw, and it’s my biggest weakness. I love drawing women’s heads, but I suck at drawing them looking up. I think I got it this time. 🙂

This was a lot of fun to do and I have to say Rob was a great guy to work with! We wound up going for a Punk-Rock Cowgirl for the poster, and I was influenced heavily by Western movie posters at first, which led me to a more rockabilly-meets-classic horror look to the poster in the end. For the girl we agreed it would be awesome if the end of the branding iron was the Liberty Bell to keep well of the fact that the band was from Philly.

Actually, in the background, you can see the original pencil art! I talked to a friend of mine who said the original pencils were awesome and I should use them somewhere in the piece, and I figured the background was a great place to put it since it helped tie everything together.

This is what happens when you go to Catholic School for 13 years, folks!

I love drawing nuns, relying on symbolism, and just being blatant at times. In this case, that’s exactly what I wanted in every possible way.

I heard Deicide was coming to town and wanted to show my support by doing a gig poster for their upcoming show. I had a vision of just some praying nun with horns coming out of her head, and a Rosary in her hands.

To be honest, this piece is as deep as it appears, and then some. As much as it may be about some nun turning to Satan, it really isn’t. In essence, I wanted to convey that the same love and devotion that can be shown to God can be shown to Satan. Is it really all that bad? Isn’t faith and love in something and someone more important than who, ESPECIALLY if they’re wind up otherwise being a good person for it?

So for this poster, I did something I normally never, EVER do; I did my own hand-drawn typography and did it as a vector! It was the most draftsman-like thing I’ve done as an artist in about 3 years because of how technical it was. I used Adobe Illustrator and for the first time turned on Smart Guides. I wished I had done it sooner! It made the curves much smoother and I love how the “e’s” came out. The typography was inspired by some classic Gothic Black-lettering, but also a bit of Art-Nouveau.